NASA recently selected Professor Coder to lead a team pursuing aviation breakthroughs designing an ultra-efficient aerodynamic wing enabling substantial reductions in fuel or energy consumption. Funded by NASA's Aeronautics University Leadership Initiative, the team includes researchers from Penn State University, Texas A&M University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Rutgers University, the University of Wyoming and two aviation companies—the Boeing Corporation and Airfoils, Inc. Many of these organizations are also Intelligent Light customers and FieldView users.

"Potential outcomes of the research could include revolutionary technologies, operational concepts, design tools, models, or other advancements we can't even begin to characterize today," said Doug Rohn, director of NASA's Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program.

A longtime user of FieldView, Dr. Coder uses FieldView throughout the CFD workflow in conjunction with the team's CFD solvers, OVERFLOW 2 and SU2.

Engineers use FieldView to ensure their simulations are properly set up, visualize the models before committing to simulation runs and for debugging input files.

During solver runs, the team uses FieldView to verify correct qualitative solution behavior is present in the code, and to ensure that boundary conditions are being properly enforced.

Visualizing results post-processed with FieldView provides high quality images and interactive capability to support interrogation by the engineers. Common visualization tools include surface contour images, constant-coordinate planes/slices and isosurfaces.

Much of the group's current research pertains to unsteady flows with resolved turbulent content, FieldView is used to generate isosurfaces of Q-criterion to explore the structure of the turbulence and to spot-check on the length scales being resolved.

"Creating a better wing—one with less drag, one that is more
efficient—is where we can really make a difference. This is a game changer for
aviation."

James Coder, Assistant Professor of Aerospace EngineeringUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville

Dr. Coder and Intelligent Light have participated together in the AIAA High Lift Prediction and Rotorcraft Hover Prediction Workshops for several years.